Adapted from Pierre Louys' 1898 novel Le Femme et le Pantin, That Obscure Object of Desire marked Buñuel's final film. Recounted in flashback to a group of railway travellers, the story wryly details the romantic perils of Mathieu, a wealthy middle-aged French sophisticate who falls desperately in love with his 19-year-old former chambermaid Conchita. Thus begins a surreal game of sexual cat-and-mouse, with Mathieu obsessively attempting to win the girl's affections as she manipulates his carnal desires, each vying to gain absolute control of the other. Brimming with the subversive wit which characterises Bunuel's finest work, That Obscure Object of Desire takes satiric aim at a decadent, decaying society riddled with political unrest and moral bankruptcy.

In the late fifteenth century, Christopher Columbus persuades the Queen of Spain to fund his latest expedition to the East by searching out new trade routes on the way. Inadvertently arriving in the Americas, Columbus attempts to civilize the natives and live in harmony with them, but his efforts are sabotaged by a crew intent on plundering all the New World has to offer.

A man writes, lives and loves in darkness. Fourteen years before, he was in a brutal car crash on the island of Lanzarote. In the accident, he not only lost his sight, he also lost Lena, the love of his life. This man used two names: Harry Caine, a playful pseudonym with which he signs his literary works, stories and scripts, and Mateo Blanco, his real name, with which he lives and signed the films he directed. After the accident, Mateo Blanco reduces himself to his pseudonym, Harry Caine. If he can't direct films he can only survive with the idea that Mateo Blanco died on Lanzarote with his beloved Lena. In the present day, Harry Caine lives thanks to the scripts he writes and to the help he gets from his faithful former production manager, Judit García, and from Diego, her son, his secretary, typist and guide. Since he decided to live and tell stories, Harry is an active, attractive blind man who has developed all his other senses in order to enjoy life, on a basis of irony and self-induced amnesia. He has erased from his biography any trace of his first identity, Mateo Blanco. One night Diego has an accident and Harry takes care of him (his mother, Judit, is out of Madrid and they decide not to tell her anything so as not to alarm her). During the first nights of his convalescence, Diego asks him about the time when he answered to the name of Mateo Blanco, after a moment of astonishment Harry can't refuse and he tells Diego what happened fourteen years before with the idea of entertaining him, just as a father tells his little child a story so that he'll fall asleep. The story of Mateo, Lena, Judit and Ernesto Martel is a story of amour fou, dominated by fatality, jealously, the abuse of power, treachery and a guilt complex. A moving and terrible story, the most expressive image of which is the photo of two lovers embracing, torn into a thousand pieces.

Val, a young, middle-class woman with a strong desire for sex, finds herself destitute after an abusive boyfriend runs off with all her money, and begins to earn a living as a high-class call girl but finds herself enjoying this life more than she could have hoped – or feared.